


These Hands That Hold Together

by beeinmybonnet



Category: Sherlock Holmes (2009)
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Pre-Canon, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-05-03
Updated: 2010-05-03
Packaged: 2017-10-09 06:52:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/84246
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beeinmybonnet/pseuds/beeinmybonnet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>1887. Two friends in a sitting-room, wide awake at an indecorous hour; a story in which Holmes' mind mutinies against him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	These Hands That Hold Together

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you, [LadyLovelace](http://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyLovelace/pseuds/LadyLovelace), for the beta; I'm much obliged to you.
> 
> _**Disclaimer:** This is a transformative work of fiction based on Guy Ritchie's adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's original works._

The neck had been broken post-mortem. Post-mortem, yet still there had been no signs of strangulation. If both scenarios were eliminated, then what else could a hanged man die of? He had hung from the ceiling, at least three feet above the ground. The noose was made of hemp; rough, coarse hemp with a faint scent of alcohol. It had been tied around his neck, but it had neither broken it nor strangled him.

Holmes let out a groan. Covering his face with his hands, he rubbed his eyes, then his cheeks and then his temples, grimacing. His thoughts were stumbling over themselves in their ardour to be the first as they rounded his mind, over and over and over and over again; he felt as if his mind were a single page of a book, imprinted with a fixed number of sentences, sentences he were bound to reiterate until a higher power gave him leave. It got him absolutely nowhere but left him exhausted.

He needed to clear his head, to shake the repetitive thoughts out of it. Shake out—shake up—knock out—knock—punch—box—boxing. Yes, boxing, that was what he needed. A good and sound beating, one that left him with a ringing in his ears and a blessedly quiet mind. A perfect remedy for a brain running amok.

Holmes dashed to his feet, nearly falling right back down again when his vision swam before his eyes. Grabbing onto the closest object of relative solidity—one of the armchairs, it turned out—he staggered to the seat and sat down as he endeavoured to regain his sense of balance.

No, he should not go boxing tonight. Foremost, it was too late; before his fit of giddiness, he had noticed the clock showed half an hour past three. Furthermore, even he realised he was not in optimum physical condition at the moment. When was the last time he had eaten? The last time he had _drank_ something must have been about five hours ago. That would certainly explain the sweet, sticky-dry sensation in his mouth. He had taken a glass of brandy, together with Watson, an intended nightcap...

The noose had had a smell of alcohol about it.

Holmes uttered an oath.

"Imitating sailors, are we?"

Holmes spun around in his chair, causing tiny black dots to flicker before his eyes yet again. When they cleared, he saw Watson standing on the threshold, observing him and with a glass of water in his hand. He was dressed in his nightshirt and dressing gown.

"Did I wake you up?" Holmes inquired, surprising himself with his hoarseness, as Watson entered the sitting-room.

"Yes, you did," Watson replied. There was no reproach in his voice, however, and he held out the glass for Holmes to take. Holmes did, and emptied it in long, greedy gulps. "Bad night?"

Holmes nodded. "It's no use," he said, when he caught Watson glancing at his abandoned violin. "I've tried, but the notes come out as monotonous as my thoughts and are of no help to me whatsoever."

Watson nodded slowly and, with a sigh, sat down on the opposite armchair. He did not speak up again, though, and Holmes was soon preoccupied by thoughts of hemp and ceilings as he twirled the glass in his hands.

"Come here, please."

Holmes looked up. Watson had spread his legs apart, wide enough for a body to fit there, and was motioning to the space between them. Too tired to restrain his smile of gratitude, Holmes put the glass on the side table and got out of his chair. As soon as he sat down on the floor in front of Watson, back to his chest, his friend's steady hands found their way into his hair and gently massaged his scalp. He let out a small moan and lolled his head forward.

It did not stop the thoughts—it did not even slow them down—but the sensation was a pleasurable one and gave Holmes something else to focus on. With his attention divided between his own mind and Watson's strong fingers, the pandemonium in the former quieted somewhat. That was the most he could hope for.

It had got just about bearable when Watson slid his hands out of Holmes' hair and down onto his shoulders. "Feeling any better?"

"Hn," Holmes mumbled in confirmation as he stared at the clutter of the room, cataloguing it. He would have preferred to close his eyes, ward off all visual impressions, but he was all but too familiar with the fact that if one reduced one of the senses, the other four would compensate for it, and he had no need to reawaken the bedlam inside his head.

Watson's hands, still on his shoulders, were warm, seeping heat into his tired muscles. Holmes reached for one of these hands and, holding it between both of his own, subjected it to close inspection.

Watson had firm, capable hands, not nimble but in no way ungainly; they were hands designed to tackle and solve any problem put into them. They bore the marks of ravages of time, telltale traces of Watson's life story, like the sheer scars from scalpels and the coarser ones from his time in Afghanistan. The tan they had shown when Holmes first met him had long ago faded, but the skin never quite regained its original tone. Watson had told him his complexion used to be even fairer than Holmes' before the war, but Holmes believed he was exaggerating. To be paler than himself, one should have to be a corpse.

A corpse hanging from the ceiling, perhaps.

The distraction was not working. Redoubling his efforts, Holmes traced the lines of Watson's palm with his fingers, wrinkles whose names he had never bothered to learn, folds that gypsies claimed could tell of the future and the past. Holmes did not care for such rigmarole; he did not have to 'read' Watson's hand to know what kind of man he was.

"Carpus," Holmes said out loud, tracing the cluster of bones over the layers of tissue and skin. "Scaphoid, trapezoid..." He trailed off, staring at the bone he could not remember the name of, his thumb rubbing back and forth over the skin, threading water just as his memory. Interesting how these bones are connected via ligaments, just like the cervical vertebrae are... No. No, he would not follow that train of thought.

"Trapezium," Watson supplied and, when Holmes continued tracing his carpus, added, "Capitate, lunate, triquetral, pisiform, hamate."

The combination of tactile, visual and aural impressions proved an excellent distraction. Holmes traced all of the bones of the hand, Watson naming each and everyone one of them, and then moved on to the forearm when he had thoroughly examined the appendage.

"See, Watson?" Holmes asked as he rolled up the arm of Watson's shirt. "Why should I need to remember information like this when I have you? You are more valuable than any medical lexicon, my dear fellow."

"The cephalic vein. Perhaps for times when I'm not around?"

Holmes snorted as he traced the vein. "When would such an occasion arrive?" he asked, a small smile playing on his lips, and glanced over his shoulder.

He stilled. Watson did not reply and wore a most peculiar expression upon his features. Holmes could not read it; there were signs of positive emotions, but also of negative ones, and the majority of them he had not the haziest notion of how to identify.

Unsettled, Holmes turned away from Watson's indecipherable gaze and concentrated on the arm he held in his hands.

"The basilic vein. Radius, ulna. Flexor digitorum profundus, flexor pollicis longus, pronator quadratus."

The forearm done, Holmes went back to tracing the hand, intent on letting Watson's voice—the same slightly hoarse tenor as always, quite interpretable—drown out every thought in his mind. Watson, bless the man, did not remark upon this, simply naming the parts yet again, even when Holmes traced his ring finger three times in a row because he liked the way he pronounced _fourth proximal phalanx_.

Eventually—_finally_—Holmes could feel his body start to unwind, his breathing evening out, how somnolence claimed him, swift and merciful. He was half aware that before he drifted off to sleep, Watson had started tracing the bones of his own limp hand, still repeating their names in hushed, quiet tones.

When Holmes dreamt, it was of skeletons and words and soft warm skin, with no corpses or hemp nooses in sight.


End file.
